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She learned to resist denying what Jiang showed her because it didn’t square with her previous notions of how things worked. She learned to stop being shocked.
Her experience during the Tournament had torn a great, jagged hole through her understanding of the world, and she waited for Jiang to fill it in for her.
Sometimes, if she bordered on asking the right question, he sent her to the library to find the answer herself.
When she asked him where Lore had been practiced before, he sent her on a wild goose chase after all that was odd and cryptic. He made her read texts on the ancient dream walkers of the southern islands and their plant spirit healing practices. He made her write detailed reports about village shamans of the Hinterlands to the north, about how they fell into trances and journeyed as spirits in the bodies of eagles. He had her pore over decades of testimony from southern Nikara villagers who claimed to be clairvoyant.
“How would you describe all of these people?” he inquired.
“Oddities. People with abilities, or people who were pretending to have abilities.” Other than that, Rin saw no way that these groups of people were linked. “How would you describe them?”
“I would call them shamans,” he said. “Those who commune with the gods.”
When she asked him what he meant by the gods, he made her study religion. Not just Nikara religion—all religions of the world, every religion that had been practiced since the dawn of time.
“What does anyone mean by gods?” he asked. “Why do we have gods? What purpose does a god serve in a society? Vex these issues. Find these answers for me.”
In a week, she produced what she thought was a brilliant report on the difference between Nikara and Hesperian religious traditions. She proudly recounted her conclusions to Jiang in the Lore garden.
The Hesperians had only one church. They believed in one divine entity: a Holy Maker, separate from and above all mortal affairs, wrought in the image of a man. Rin argued that this god, this Maker, was a means by which Hesperia’s government maintained order. The priests of the Order of the Holy Maker held no political office but exerted more cultural control than the Hesperian central government did. Since Hesperia was a large country without warlords who had absolute power over each of its states, rule of law had to be enforced by propagation of the myth of moral codes.
The Empire, in contrast, was a country of what Rin labeled superstitious atheists. Of course, Nikan had its gods in abundance. But like the Fangs, the majority of Nikara were religious only when it suited them. The Empire’s wandering monks constituted a small minority of the population, mere curators of the past, rather than part of any institution with real power.
Gods in Nikan were the heroes of myths, tokens of culture, icons to be acknowledged during important life events like weddings, births, or deaths. They were personifications of emotions that the Nikara themselves felt. But no one actually believed that you would have bad luck for the rest of the year if you forgot to light incense to the Azure Dragon. No one really thought that you could keep your loved ones safe by praying to the Great Tortoise.
The Nikara practiced these rituals regardless, went through the motions because there was comfort in doing so, because it was a way for them to express their anxieties about the ebbs and flows of their fortunes.
“And so religion is merely a social construct in both the east and west,” Rin concluded. “The difference lies in its utility.”
Jiang had been listening attentively throughout her presentation. When she finished, he blew air out of his cheeks like a child and rubbed at his temples. “So you think Nikara religion is simply superstition?”
“Nikara religion is too haphazard to hold any degree of truth,” Rin said. “You have the four cardinal gods—the Dragon, the Tiger, the Tortoise, and the Phoenix. Then you have local household gods, village guardian gods, animal gods, gods of rivers, gods of mountains . . .” She counted them off on her fingers. “How could all of them exist in the same space? How could the spiritual realm be, with all these gods vying for dominance? The best explanation is that when we say ‘god’ in Nikan, we mean a story. Nothing more.”
“So you have no faith in the gods?” Jiang asked.
“I believe in the gods as much as the next Nikara does,” she replied. “I believe in gods as a cultural reference. As metaphors. As things we refer to keep us safe because we can’t do anything else, as manifestations of our neuroses. But not as things that I truly trust are real. Not as things that hold actual consequence for the universe.”
She said this with a straight face, but she was exaggerating.
Because she knew that something was real. She knew that on some level, there was more to the cosmos than what she encountered in the material world. She was not truly such a skeptic as she pretended to be.
But the best way to get Jiang to explain anything was by taking radical positions, because when she argued from the extremes, he made his best arguments in response.
He hadn’t yet taken the bait, so she continued: “If there is a divine creator, some ultimate moral authority, then why do bad things happen to good people? And why would this deity create people at all, since people are such imperfect beings?”
“But if nothing is divine, why do we ascribe godlike status to mythological figures?” Jiang countered. “Why bow to the Great Tortoise? The Snail Goddess Nüwa? Why burn incense to the heavenly pantheon? Believing in any religion involves sacrifice. Why would any poor, penniless Nikara farmer knowingly make sacrifices to entities he knew were just myths? Who does that benefit? How did these practices originate?”
“I don’t know,” admitted Rin.
“Then find out. Find out the nature of the cosmos.”
Rin thought it was somewhat unreasonable to ask her to puzzle out what philosophers and theologians had been trying to answer for millennia, but she returned to the library.
And came back with more questions still. “But how does the existence or nonexistence of the gods affect me? Why does it matter how the universe came to be?”
“Because you’re part of it. Because you exist. And unless you want to only ever be a tiny modicum of existence that doesn’t understand its relation to the grander web of things, you will explore.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I know you want power.” He tapped her forehead again. “But how can you borrow power from the gods when you don’t understand what they are?”
Under Jiang’s orders, Rin spent more time in the library than most fifth-year apprentices. He assigned her to write essays on a daily basis, the prompt always derived from a topic they had arrived at after hours of conversation. He made her draw connections between texts of different disciplines, texts that were written centuries apart, and texts written in different languages.
“How do Seejin’s theories of transmitting ki through human air passages relate to the Speerly practice of inhaling the ash of the deceased?”
“How has the roster of Nikara gods changed over time, and how did this reflect the eminence of different Warlords at different points in history?”
“When did the Federation begin worshipping their sovereign as a divine entity, and why?”
“How does the doctrine of separation of church and state affect Hesperian politics? Why is this doctrine ironic?”
